In 100 hours of ground combat, one side lost 3,300 tanks. The other side lost zero to enemy fire. They did lose some tanks, and the reason for that is horrible, as you're about to see. This is the story of tank crews on both sides of Operation Desert Storm, who saw some of the most intense armored combat since World War II.
Two Very Different Armies
Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2nd, 1990. A hundred thousand troops and about 700 tanks rolled across the border in a single night and seized the entire country in two days. This was the world's fifth largest army. Almost a million soldiers and over 5,000 tanks. In response, a coalition of 39 nations assembled in Saudi Arabia with over 3,000 tanks, thousands of fighting vehicles, and about 670,000 troops.
American tank crews formed the core of this force. They had spent years training in West Germany preparing to fight Soviet armor, because that was seen as the most likely next major conflict. Instead, they now found themselves about to fight those very tanks they'd heard so much about, most notably the T-72 with its 125 millimeter smoothbore cannon, which was actually the most powerful tank gun in the world when it first appeared.
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| Iraqi T-72 |
The US Army deployed 1,956 M1A1 Abrams, about 1,200 of which were heavy armor variants with depleted uranium inserts. Britain brought 221 Challenger 1 tanks, the largest British armored deployment since World War II. Rolling alongside them were some 2,200 Bradley fighting vehicles.
What Each Side Brought to the Fight
The Abrams carried the M829A1, a depleted uranium sabot round. A 4.6 kilogram penetrator flying at about 1,500 meters per second that was self-sharpening on impact. Instead of flattening out like tungsten, it stayed sharp as it punched through, penetrating an estimated 570 millimeters of armor at 2,000 meters. The fire control system gave a 95% first round hit probability at standard combat ranges. Laser rangefinder, fully stabilized gun, and thermal night vision that was about to become the deciding factor in the sandstorms and night battles ahead.
For protection, the Abrams had steel encased depleted uranium armor over composite armor. But the most important feature was its ammunition storage with blast doors designed to blow outward, away from the crew. If the ammo cooked off, the crew still had a chance.
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| M1 Abrams' Armor |
The T-72s the Iraqis had were a very different story. These were export variants, deliberately downgraded by the Soviets. No ceramic rod inserts in the armor, older ammunition types, and a whole list of missing features. Their main anti-tank round, a steel kinetic penetrator already withdrawn from Soviet service around 1973, could go through about 250 millimeters of armor at 2,500 meters. The Abrams had roughly 800 millimeters of effective frontal armor. And the ammunition sat in an autoloader carousel right inside the crew compartment, with the commander and gunner literally sitting on top of it.
The Iraqi tank force was split into two armies. The Republican Guard were volunteers with eight years of combat experience from the Iran-Iraq War. But that war taught them the wrong lessons, static defensive positions and trench warfare. Their best tank was the T-72M1, and they had about a thousand. The bulk of the force were Chinese Type 69s and older Soviet T-55s, manned by poorly trained conscripts with low morale who didn't want to be there.
The Iraqis had no real night vision. Their infrared searchlights had a fraction of the Abrams' range and actually advertised their position to anyone with thermal equipment. Meanwhile, the Abrams had a passive system that emitted nothing and detected everything.
Six Weeks of Bombing
Before any tanks met each other, there were six weeks of air strikes. A-10 Warthogs, Apaches, and B-52 bombers flew over 100,000 sorties and dropped almost 90,000 tons of bombs. That alone destroyed about 900 tanks and over 2,000 military vehicles. Iraqi forward positions sat under constant bombardment with supply lines cut, basically starving, waiting for either enemy tanks to appear or to get blown up from the sky.
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| The Bombing Aftermath |
The Ground War
The ground assault launched in the pre-dawn hours of February 24th, 1991. While the Marines attacked directly into Kuwait and an amphibious feint kept Iraqi attention on the coast, the real striking force swept north through undefended western desert into Iraq itself, then turned east to slam into the Republican Guard's flank across a 300 mile front. The Iraqis never saw it coming.
From the start, the experience for American crews was surreal. They drove straight into a sandstorm with visibility at zero. The only way to navigate was through thermal sights and GPS. Crews sat inside their tanks for 100 hours straight.
They rolled through Iraqi positions devastated by five weeks of bombing and found mass surrender on a scale nobody anticipated. Marines captured nearly 10,000 prisoners on the first day alone. But the Republican Guard was still ahead, dug in and waiting.
Eagle Troop and 23 Minutes of Combat
On February 26th, Eagle Troop, 130 soldiers with nine Abrams and twelve Bradleys, ran into a Republican Guard brigade commanded by a man referred to as Major Muhammad. He was a graduate of the US Army Infantry Officer Advanced Course at Fort Benning, trained by the Americans themselves. His defense was fundamentally sound, a reverse slope defense with roughly 40 dug-in tanks and 16 BMPs.
But Muhammad didn't know the Americans had GPS. He assumed they would follow roads and oriented his entire defense facing south. The Americans came from the west, hitting his completely exposed right flank.Within about one minute, everything in range was burning. The main engagement lasted roughly 23 minutes. Eagle Troop destroyed around 30 to 50 tanks, 25 armored personnel carriers, 40 trucks, and hundreds of infantry. Eagle Troop suffered zero casualties.
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| Eagle Troop Advancing |
The Night That Haunts Veterans
As darkness fell that same day, the First Infantry Division began advancing through the night in conditions that were horrible. Overcast skies, rain mixed with smoke from Kuwaiti oil fires created toxic oily haze. Hundreds of burning vehicles made everything worse. With the naked eye, all you could see was tracer fire and tanks exploding.
Through thermal sights, a hot vehicle is a hot vehicle. It doesn't matter whose side it's on. Iraqi tanks whose crews were in shelters or whose engines were cold didn't show up as threats. Coalition vehicles drove past enemy armor without knowing it was there. Then those Iraqi crews jumped in, started engines, and suddenly appeared right among American formations. The result was 360 degree fighting with no clear front line.
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| A Tank seen through a thermal site |
And the Iraqis at this fight, they fought. Infantry exited burning BMPs and attacked on foot, physically swarming coalition vehicles. Fighters jumped from hiding with RPG launchers trying to hit vulnerable rear armor.
Then came the part that haunts American veterans more than anything else. Around 0200 hours, a company of Bradleys drove into an Iraqi bunker complex. RPG flashes and the Bradleys' movement looked identical to Iraqi tanks through thermal sights. American gunners opened fire on their own vehicles. One Bradley was hit by two rounds, killing three soldiers. Another took a round clean through both sides, killing one more. Two hours later it happened again when tanks spotted a Bradley stuck in a bomb crater and put three rounds into it. Five Abrams were also hit by friendly fire that night.
When it was over, six Americans were dead and 32 wounded, most of them not from Iraqi fire but from their own side.
Medina Ridge
The next afternoon produced the war's largest tank engagement. The First Armored Division found the Medina Division of the Republican Guard dug in behind a low rise stretching about seven miles. The Iraqis had set up another reverse slope defense with only turrets exposed.
Thermal imaging defeated the tactic completely. Abrams gunners spotted heat signatures through terrain that would have hidden the tanks from any visual observation. At five kilometers, Americans could see the heat of a soldier relieving himself in the bushes. The Iraqis had no idea the Americans were even there until their own tanks started exploding.
The decisive phase lasted about 40 minutes. Iraqi shells fell short while Abrams rounds punched through T-72s from distances Iraqi gunners couldn't even see. The result was 186 Iraqi tanks and 127 armored vehicles destroyed. The only American killed was 20-year-old Specialist Clarence Cash, struck by a friendly tank round.
Most of the Medina Division's crews died in their vehicles. They didn't abandon their positions. They knew their rounds were falling short and they probably couldn't penetrate American armor. They stayed and fought anyway.
What Was Left
When the fighting stopped, the desert was a tank graveyard. Roughly 3,300 Iraqi tanks destroyed, nearly 2,000 armored vehicles, over 2,000 artillery pieces. American crews advancing through the wreckage were ordered to close their hatches because ammunition was still cooking off in destroyed vehicles days after the fighting ended.
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| The Tank Graveyard |
What was left of the crews inside those tanks wasn't recognizable as people anymore. Body fat melted into hull floors and remains burned to charcoal. The smell was something veterans mention over and over. Burned metal, burned fuel, burned flesh, all mixed together in the desert heat.
American losses were 219 killed, 154 in battle, and of those, 35 were from friendly fire. Another 72 Americans were wounded by their own side's weapons. The coalition lost 31 tanks, but not a single one was destroyed by Iraqi fire. Zero. Twenty of 28 Bradleys lost were hit by friendly rounds, not Iraqi weapons.
3,300 tanks lost on one side, zero to enemy fire on the other. But the Americans who fought there don't talk about the lopsided numbers. They talk about the night they couldn't tell friend from enemy through their thermal sights, and the brothers they killed by mistake. That's the part of Desert Storm that stayed with them.
Written by Andreja Rakočević, a military history writer and co-creator of the RogerRoger YouTube channel.